For a campaign that has been up-and-running since just about January 21, 2009, the Obama crowd did not have a good "official" first week.

Last weekend, Barack Obama officially launched his campaign for re-election at a rally on the campus of Ohio State University. A couple of things were wrong with the event. About 14,000 people showed up, but the arena holds many more and the traveling press made much of the empty seats.

That's not Obama's fault. It's the fault of the advance team and the campaign, but there you are.

During his remarks, Obama lashed out at Republicans in Congress for refusing to provide infrastructure funds including funds for a bridge connecting Ohio to Kentucky in Cincinnati (homes to Speaker John Boehner and Senate Republican Leader respectively).

He told the crowd that people had to drive an hour-and-a-half out of their way just to get to work.

According to the Washington Post's Fact Checker all of that is true except for:

-- The bridge over the Ohio River in Cincinnati has never been closed. -- The bridge over the Ohio River in Cincinnati has bipartisan support to repair it. -- The project to repair the bridge over the Ohio River in Cincinnati isn't slated to begin until 2015. -- The bridge he was talking about connects Indiana to Kentucky. -- The bridge connecting Indiana to Kentucky has been repaired and is open to traffic.

Ok. That's not Obama's fault. It's the fault of the speech writers, but there you are.

On Sunday, Vice President Joe Biden appeared on Meet the Press and got way off message on gay marriage when he said:

"I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual - men and women marrying - are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don't see much of a distinction beyond that."

Thing is, according to Yahoo! News, "the president has stopped short of endorsing gay marriage, instead articulating that his views are 'evolving.'"

Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, jumped in on the issue by announcing his support for gay marriage, but it is not clear why he thought he needed to do that.

Neither of these are Obama's fault. It's the fault of his Vice President who runs off at the mouth so often the White House staff has taken to calling them "Joe Bombs," but there you are.

Jeff Greenfield who has been observing and analyzing American Politics for about as long as I have wrote a blistering piece detailing four events of Obama's first week including the empty seats and Joe Biden.

But he added the fact that the "April unemployment rate for workers under 25 was 16.4 percent and as many as half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed."

As young voters are a huge piece of the coalition that carried Obama to victory in 2008, anything that dampens their enthusiasm - not being able to find a job would be an example - will likely suppress their vote totals in November.

That's not Obama's fault. That's the fault of George W. Bush and Herbert Hoover, but there you are.

Finally, MullPal and sometimes backdoor neighbor James Carville, on the CNN.com site, wrote:

"Democratic fundraisers, activists, supporters, and even politicians alike have somehow collectively lapsed into the sentiment that the president is going to be reelected and that we have a good shot to take the House back while holding the Senate."

Then he wrote:

"What are you smoking? What are you drinking? What are you snorting or just what in the hell are you thinking?"

James correctly points out that the RealClearPolitics average of national polls has Obama leading Romney "by three-tenths of one percent."

As of last night that had dropped by A THIRD to .2 percent.

That's not Obama's fault. As we saw over the weekend in Europe there is a significant "throw the rascals out" mentality in Europe much as there was in the U.S. less than two years ago in the mid-term elections of 2010.

During the meeting, Obama told the rabbis that when he was running for Senate some accused him of being the Jewish lobby's "puppet" because of his many Jewish associates in Chicago. Now, he said, the Republicans are trying to portray him as not being supportive of Israel by stressing the fact that his father was Muslim and he has a Muslim name, as well as by claiming that he had been overly aggressive in pushing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to promote the peace process with the Palestinians.

According to the US leader, he had Israel's best interest in mind.

The president further told the rabbis that as a senator he fully backed legislation aimed at preserving Israel's qualitative military edge.

At the unveiling of former President George W. Bush's official portrait at the White House this afternoon, President Barack Obama joined his predecessor and their wives in delivering brief (and at times nice, cordial, and funny) remarks. But there was a seemingly out of place moment during the ceremony when Obama seemed to veer into reiterating his frequent trope that he inherited a bad economy from Bush.

"The months before I took the oath of office were a chaotic time," Obama said, after explaining that the president's job is isolating, and that he and Bush have a connection since so few have held the job. "We knew our economy was in trouble, our fellow Americans were in pain, but we wouldn't know until later just how breathtaking the financial crisis had been."

Obama did note the Bush tried to get it right. "Still, over those 2 1/2 months, in the midst of that crisis, President Bush, his cabinet, his staff, many of you who are here today, went out of your ways--George, you went out of your way--to make sure that the transition to a new administration was a seamless as possible. President Bush understood that rescuing our economy was not just a Democratic or Republican issue, it was an American priority. I'll always be grateful for that."

There were plenty of moments, however, when Obama was gracious to his predecessor. "After 3 1/2 years in office and much more gray hair, I have a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by the presidents who came before me, including my immediate predecessor President Bush," Obama said. "In this job no decision that reaches your desk is easy, no choice you make is without costs, no matter how hard you try, you're not going to make everybody happy."

And Obama thanked the previous occupant of the White House for the TV programming in the presidential mansion. "You also left me a really good TV sports package," Obama told Bush. "I use it."

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama's administration called on Congress to do more to help the economy create jobs, with Labor Secretary Hilda Solis saying May's rise in the unemployment rate was unacceptable.

"Congress has to take some action because while we see the unemployment rate where it is, it's not acceptable," Solis told the CNBC network on Friday.

President Barack Obama cited a Republican "fever" as the reason why he hasn't been able to make progress on deficit reduction or immigration reform at a Minneapolis fundraiser today.

The remarks are one of Obama's sharpest Republican critiques — equating their recent activism with illness — and are sure to draw condemnation from the right.

From the pool report:

Most of the talk was standard campaign speech, but the president did say he hopes that Republicans will be more cooperative after he wins reelection.

"It will be coming to a head in this election. We're going to have as stark a contrast as we've seen in a very long time between the two candidates. 2008 was a significant election, obviously. But John McCain believed in climate change. John believed in campaign finance reform. He believed in immigration reform. There were some areas where you saw some overlap."

"In this election, the Republican Party has moved in a fundamentally different direction. The center of gravity for their party has shifted."

He talked of deficit reduction and said "we couldn't' get them to take yes for an answer."

"I believe that If we're successful in this election, when we're successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn't make much sense because I'm not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again."

"I believe that If we're successful in this election, when we're successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn't make much sense because I'm not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again."

Obama said he expects that after his reelection, Congress will pass a balanced deficit reduction plan, a highway bill, immigration reform.

"My expectation is that if we can break this fever, that we can invest in clean energy and energy efficiency because that's not a partisan issue."

Economy: President Obama has been on the job for nearly three and a half years, but the White House says bad news on jobs is George W. Bush's fault. Time to own up to your own record, Mr. President.

It was the most tepid job growth seen in America in a year, with fewer than 70,000 jobs added for May — less than half what economists expected.

On top of that, March and April's combined job growth was revised downward by almost 50,000. The unemployment rate is again going in the wrong direction, from April's 8.1% to 8.2% in May.

In response to the jobs report, the Dow industrials plunged more than 274 points, or 2.2%, the index's worst day of the year and falling into negative territory for 2012.

Welcome to the Obama "recovery."

The White House says this economy isn't really the president's responsibility. Its take on what the Washington Post called a "dismal U.S. jobs report" as "businesses dramatically scaled back hiring," was this from Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Alan Krueger:

"Today we learned that the economy has added private sector jobs for 27 straight months" — as if lukewarm net job growth that's actually slower than the growth in the labor force should be a cause to break out the champagne in the biggest economy in the world.

Instead of blaming its failed trillion-dollar Keynesian stimulus, plus at least another trillion taking over the country's health-insurance system, the White House disgracefully points a finger at its predecessor.

President Obama greeted last week’s rotten news on unemployment by saying the economy is facing “serious headwinds.” It took him three-plus years to figure that out?

Last Friday’s crummy jobs report followed the grim news that economic growth is below 2 percent. We’re slowing down again, after not speeding up very much — and the storm clouds over Europe threaten to toss the whole world back into full recession. What has this president ever done to help the economy heal?

Fine, Obama took office in the teeth of the Great Recession, with businesses shedding jobs in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But that was three-plus years ago.

EPA

Barely even pretending to have a clue: Without real solutions, Obama offers distractions.

As the new president, and with the help of a solidly Democratic Congress, he gave us a bunch of stuff he said would turn things around: Nearly $1 trillion in stimulus spending, which was supposed to kick the economy back into gear; ObamaCare, which allegedly fixes long-term problems; the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law, which claimed to tackle the roots of the 2008 meltdown.

Then his party lost big in 2010 — and he apparently gave up on doing anything to help the economy. He even ignored the recommendations of his bipartisan deficit-reduction panel — including its push for tax reform, probably the best economic-growth idea to ever come near this White House.

De facto, he’s standing on the “achievements” of his first two years. But we all know how those turned out.

Dodd-Frank almost assures that taxpayers will have to bail out the “too big to fail” banks in the next blowup, while heaping so many regulations on them that they aren’t lending to small business. For all the handouts given to people with underwater mortgages, housing prices remain depressed. And the twin culprits of the housing bubble, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, remain largely intact, still running up new taxpayer-backed debt.

Meanwhile, the “shovel ready” construction jobs his stimulus package was supposed to create never happened — and the president actually jokes about it. The promised “green jobs” drowned in oceans of red ink at government-backed losers like Solyndra.

They told us the stimulus would bring unemployment down to less than 6 percent by now; it’s 8.2 percent — and rising.

And only Democratic Kool-aid drinkers think ObamaCare’s going to be anything but a growing hit on the economy.

So what does Obama have to say for himself now that his economic plan has so obviously failed?

Consider what Obama said on Friday after the lousy jobs report: “We knew the road to recovery would not be easy, we knew it would take time, we knew there would be ups and downs along the way . . . We do have better days ahead.”

Great. How exactly are we going to get there, again?

The president’s plan seems to go something like this:

* Washington should pick the winners (and the losers), like Solyndra. These businesses fit his ideological goals, so someday they won’t be miserable failures.

* The government should pick who gets tax breaks; such conglomerates as GE (run by Obama pal Jeffrey Immelt) should pay little if any taxes, while small businesses and families earning $250,000 (not that much in expensive places like in New York) pay much higher tax rates, because they’re somehow “millionaires and billionaires.”

* Hit real millionaires and billionaires with the “Buffett tax” so they can pay for more stimulus spending — no matter that the tax would only cover a few days of added federal spending, or that most of the jobs “saved or created” by the stimulus were pure imagination.

In 2008, Obama seemed like a serious man at a time when the country needed to deal with a serious situation. But he’s proved to be anything but serious when it comes to dealing with the nation’s economic woes.

Reporters in the Obama camp still parrot his line about how President George W. Bush left him with such a mess, or (as one told me on Friday) that Americans just have to get used to a “new normal” of low growth and high unemployment.

I doubt it because he barely even pretends to have a clue. He could be offering something bold and different as voters decide whether to give him four more years; instead, he’s offering the same excuses, the same “solutions” and whatever distractions he can come up with.

ROME: French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Tuesday hit back at comments by US President Barack Obama about the threat of the European debt crisis, saying it had originated in the United States.

"The crisis did not start in Europe... Lehman Brothers was not a European bank," Fabius said after talks with his counterpart Giulio Terzi in Rome.

"We should not shift responsibility. We're all in the same boat," he said.

Obama said Saturday that Europe's economic woes were causing trouble for the United States' own economy, after the US unemployment rate rose for the first time in almost a year, spelling trouble for his reelection bid.

"The crisis in Europe's economy has cast a shadow on our own. And all of this makes it even more challenging to fully recover and lay the foundation for an economy that's built to last," he said in his weekly radio and Internet address.

Fabius also said Tuesday the European Union should find a "practical method" to help Spanish banks, adding that Spain was in "a very difficult economic situation."

"We could have expected the borrowing costs to go down but that is not what has happened. We are faced with a considerable difficulty," he said.

"We now have to find a practical method for the Spanish banking system to function without increasing the deficit, which would raise borrowing costs.

"The European system as a whole has to find a solution to avoid suffocation," said Fabius, a former prime minister and finance minister.

"It's urgent. Decisions have to be taken in the next few weeks," he said.

As bond markets charge exorbitant rates to lend to Spain, investors fear that Madrid may be forced to seek external aid to finance a bailout of the country's bad loan-ridden financial system.

Stricken Spanish lender Bankia alone has asked for a total of 23.5 billion euros ($29.4 billion) to help repair a balance sheet that has a vast exposure to the property market, which crashed in 2008.

A new book reveals that President Obama deferred a major national security decision to his controversial attorney general, Eric Holder. Instead of deciding himself whether 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be tried by a military tribunal or in a federal court, Obama pushed the decision off to Holder.

At a White House celebration, Holder "wasn't going to waste a rare moment along with the president," according to an account from the book Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency by Newsweek correspondent Daniel Klaidman. "He had come with an agenda, and told the president that he was thinking about prosecuting KSM in federal court. Obama had simply acknowledged that he would defer to Holder on the matter: 'It’s your call, you’re the attorney general.'"

Yet, almost half a year later, according to the same book, President Obama reportedly told an aide that he didn't realize his deference on this issue to Holder included KSM.

"Once, the president had peevishly asked an aide whose idea it was to prosecute the 9/11 defendants in civilian courts in the first place," Klaidman writes. "The adviser sheepishly told him it was his, reminding Obama that in his Archives speech he’d insisted that the presumption would be in favor of Article III courts unless military commissions were the only viable option. I didn’t know that meant KSM, Obama answered."

The confusion between President Obama and Holder was perhaps apparent in the decision to try KSM in a New York City courthouse. Holder's announcement was immediately controversial. And after sustained of public outcry (including from Democratic officials in New York and Mayor Michael Bloomberg), the decision was reversed.

President Obama Just Hammered Congress On The Economy And Is Concerned About Europe

Brett LoGiurato|26 minutes ago|224|10

President Barack Obama is giving a speech on the U.S. economy and the European debt crisis, urging Congress to take up his "to-do list" and the Jobs Act he proposed in September.

Obama hit on Congressional Republicans for not moving on his proposals. The speech came a week after a dismal May jobs report gave Republican challenger Mitt Romney and other Republicans chances to hammer him. With the economy expected to be a referendum on the direction of the country on the economy and jobs, that report also sent his chances of re-election spiraling down.

He also remarked on the debt crisis in Europe, saying, it affects the U.S. because Europe is the country's largest trading partner.

Obama cited Italy and Spain's good structural reforms, but advocated against further austerity.

"The situation in Europe is not simply a debt crisis," Obama said.

Of why it's been difficult for reform in Europe, Obama hits Congress again: "Imagine dealing with 17 Congresses instead of just one. That makes things more challenging."

He moved back to the situation at home, commending the private sector for creating jobs but further advocating his jobs plan for help in the public sector. He said the private sector is doing "fine." Specifically, he said, his plan would help hiring among teachers, police, firefighters, and in construction.

"State and local government hiring has been going in the wrong direction," Obama said.

UPDATE:

Obama also got a question about the national security leaks and some suggestions that his administration has been deliberately leaking information to boost his re-election efforts. "The idea that my White House would purposely release national security information is offensive."

President Barack Obama pauses as he talks about the economy, Friday, June 8, 2012, in the briefing room of the White House in Washington.

President Obama contended on Friday that the private sector is rebounding, but blamed a shaky Europe and a balky Congress for stunting America’s economic recovery — and demanded that Republicans stop blocking his agenda.

Appearing in the White House briefing room, the president chided House Republicans for ignoring his jobs program, particularly with the worsening situation in Europe. “In light of the headwinds that we're facing right now,” he said, “I urge them to reconsider.”

(RELATED: Obama Points to Europe as Risk to U.S. Economy)

Obama also stressed the impact that the eurozone crisis is having on the U.S. economy, cautiously prodding European leaders. “Their success is good for us. And the sooner that they act and the more decisive and concrete their action, the sooner people and markets will regain confidence, and the cheaper the costs of cleanup will be down the road.”

After a week that the White House and all Democrats fervently wish everybody could forget, it was critical for the president to step forward and combat the notion that the nation’s economic affairs are drifting. He needed to show command, to show that somebody is in charge. Obama needed to counter the message of the past week, and he continued to blame everybody else — primarily Europeans across the ocean and Republicans at home — for the bad news.

That news started a week earlier with a dismal May jobs report. Then former President Clinton undercut the Obama campaign’s message on Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney’s private-sector experience. Then Democrats watched Gov. Scott Walker cruise to a solid victory for Republicans in a Wisconsin recall battle the White House never wanted to see waged. That was followed by more bad news from Europe and another counter-message from Clinton on the Bush-era tax cuts. And don’t forget that Republicans and Romney are now out-fundraising Obama and Democrats. And just hours before the president came before reporters, CNN released a poll showing that a majority of the country — 51 percent — continues to oppose the health care overhaul that is the signature accomplishment of his first term.

It might not have been what The Washington Post called a “terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad week.” But it was pretty bad.

The president’s answer was to return to the message he’s been testing for a month: It’s all the fault of the Republicans in Congress who are ignoring the To Do list he unveiled on May 8 in Albany, N.Y. The list is a mix of previously announced measures, including tax credits for hiring, mortgage relief for homeowners, and expanded tax credits for clean energy.

Anticipating that message, House Republicans fired back before Obama even spoke. Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, noted that the To Do list “has been ignored in the Democrat-run Senate.” Trying to keep the blame at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Buck, contended that the Republican House already has “passed more than 30 jobs bills that are sitting in the Senate right now.”

The president argued that the economic growth is not as robust as it should be because of layoffs by state and local governments. “Overall, the private sector has been doing a good job creating jobs. We’ve seen record profits in the corporate sector,” he said. “The big challenge we have in our economy right now is state and local government hiring has been going in the wrong direction.”

Republicans, led by Romney, seized on his comment that “the private sector’s doing fine.” In a statement, Romney asked, “Is he really that out of touch?” He added, “I think he’s defining what it means to be detached and out of touch with the American people,” calling Obama’s comment an “extraordinary miscalculation.”

The GOP has been quick to charge that Obama is trying to blame Europe for problems here at home. But the abbreviated press conference, during which the president took questions from three reporters, did provide the sharpest insight yet into both the president’s approach to the European crisis and the amount of his time it is demanding.

“It’s fair to say that over the last two years, I’m in consistent discussions with European leadership and consistent discussions with my economic team,” he said, adding, “This is a global economy now and what happens anywhere in the world can have an impact here in the United States.”

Obama’s concern for the fragility of the European Union and the plight of hard-hit countries like Greece was evident as he tried to strike a careful balance between supporting allied leaders and warning them against policy missteps.

“What we’ve tried to do is to be constructive, to not frame this as us scolding them or telling them what to do, but give them advice based on our experiences here,” Obama told reporters.

In his most expansive comments yet on the situation across the Atlantic, he pointedly warned Greece not to leave the EU. “The Greek people need to recognize that their hardships will likely be worse if they choose to exit the Eurozone,” he said.

Obama also cautiously praised European leaders for coming to the conclusion that they need to stress growth and not exclusively focus on austerity. “They understand the seriousness of the situation and the urgent need to act,” he said. “They’ve got to promote economic growth and job creation. Some countries have discovered it’s a lot harder to rein in deficits and debt if your economy’s not growing.”

The president said EU leaders face “tough” decisions, but that “Europe has the capacity to make them. And they have America’s support.”

He did not add – but could have – that the sooner the continent stabilizes economically, the sooner the president’s reelection campaign can rebound and the less likely it is he will have to suffer through another week as gloomy as the one just ended.

Obama: The GOP stuck me with the tab for a steak dinner Hot Air ^ | June 12, 2012 | Erika Johnsen Posted on June 12, 2012 7:52:18 PM EDT by Sir Napsalot

He. Cannot. Be. Serious. And yet, he is. If this doesn’t qualify as playing up the intellectually cheap, populist, class-warfare rhetoric, then I don’t know what does. He’s not just decrying ‘tax cuts for the wealthy’ (a.k.a., here, the Bush-era tax cuts) as a paltry route to prosperity, he’s throwing in a steak-and-a-martini metaphor to really classy it up!

(snip) “Those of us who have spent time in the real world understand that the problem is not that the American people aren’t productive enough,” Obama said during a fundraiser today, after saying that Romney believes that America “automatically” prospers when the wealthy profit. “[Romney says] his 25 years in the private sector gives him a special understanding of how the economy works, [so] my question is why are you running with the same bad ideas that brought our economy to the brink of disaster?” … The president also said that Republicans, not Democrats, caused the current budget crisis. “I love listening to these guys give us lectures about debt and deficits. I inherited a trillion dollar deficit!” he said. Obama compared Republicans to a person who orders a steak dinner and martini and then, “just as you’re sitting down, they leave, and accuse you of running up the tab.”

Obama: The GOP stuck me with the tab for a steak dinner Hot Air ^ | June 12, 2012 | Erika Johnsen Posted on June 12, 2012 7:52:18 PM EDT by Sir Napsalot

He. Cannot. Be. Serious. And yet, he is. If this doesn’t qualify as playing up the intellectually cheap, populist, class-warfare rhetoric, then I don’t know what does. He’s not just decrying ‘tax cuts for the wealthy’ (a.k.a., here, the Bush-era tax cuts) as a paltry route to prosperity, he’s throwing in a steak-and-a-martini metaphor to really classy it up!

(snip) “Those of us who have spent time in the real world understand that the problem is not that the American people aren’t productive enough,” Obama said during a fundraiser today, after saying that Romney believes that America “automatically” prospers when the wealthy profit. “[Romney says] his 25 years in the private sector gives him a special understanding of how the economy works, [so] my question is why are you running with the same bad ideas that brought our economy to the brink of disaster?” … The president also said that Republicans, not Democrats, caused the current budget crisis. “I love listening to these guys give us lectures about debt and deficits. I inherited a trillion dollar deficit!” he said. Obama compared Republicans to a person who orders a steak dinner and martini and then, “just as you’re sitting down, they leave, and accuse you of running up the tab.”

Sad thing is that there are people out there, some who even post on this board, that believe that crap. Even sadder is that they actually have the right to vote and make the same mistake again of supporting that imbecile.

Sad thing is that there are people out there, some who even post on this board, that believe that crap. Even sadder is that they actually have the right to vote and make the same mistake again of supporting that imbecile.

Why is this man whining, blaming the federal budget deficit on George Bush three-and-a-half years into his term in office? He must think we’re really, really stupid.

Virtually upon entering office, Obama signed off on enormous spending programs including the monumental stimulus bill. This included a $410 billion omnibus spending bill that Bush had refused to sign before he left office involving mind-boggling expansions of federal agencies such as the EEOC. More here and here.

The putative importance of deficit spending has been a doctrinal keystone of the administration. It gave us the trillion dollar stimulus program that held unemployment below 8 percent. At least it gave us the trillion dollar stimulus program. Remember, Mr. President, you didn’t want to let a crisis go to waste?

Obama’s blaming his predecessor for his own record as his first time comes to a close is incredibly unbecoming. Listen to his tone in the video. The whining makes him unlikable. But it is not just the tone that is off.

His comments are ineffective. It’s too soon to rewrite history. We know he is wildly stretching the truth. It is almost to the point where, as Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, every word he says is false, including “and” and “the.”

His comments are mendacious as well, of course. As I say, we know he is wildly stretching the truth. It is not just his comments that are ineffective. His policies are as well, assuming their intent was to foster economic growth. On the contrary, they have retarded economic growth.

His comments are demeaning to his office. This guy is president of the United States. He is whining while wildly stretching the truth. It is unbecoming when a child behaves like this, let alone a president.

Why is this man whining, blaming the federal budget deficit on George Bush three-and-a-half years into his term in office? He must think we’re really, really stupid.

Virtually upon entering office, Obama signed off on enormous spending programs including the monumental stimulus bill. This included a $410 billion omnibus spending bill that Bush had refused to sign before he left office involving mind-boggling expansions of federal agencies such as the EEOC. More here and here.

The putative importance of deficit spending has been a doctrinal keystone of the administration. It gave us the trillion dollar stimulus program that held unemployment below 8 percent. At least it gave us the trillion dollar stimulus program. Remember, Mr. President, you didn’t want to let a crisis go to waste?

Obama’s blaming his predecessor for his own record as his first time comes to a close is incredibly unbecoming. Listen to his tone in the video. The whining makes him unlikable. But it is not just the tone that is off.

His comments are ineffective. It’s too soon to rewrite history. We know he is wildly stretching the truth. It is almost to the point where, as Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, every word he says is false, including “and” and “the.”

His comments are mendacious as well, of course. As I say, we know he is wildly stretching the truth. It is not just his comments that are ineffective. His policies are as well, assuming their intent was to foster economic growth. On the contrary, they have retarded economic growth.

His comments are demeaning to his office. This guy is president of the United States. He is whining while wildly stretching the truth. It is unbecoming when a child behaves like this, let alone a president.

In a Thursday speech, President Barack Obama will argue that he needs four more years to undo the damage done under his predecessor, President George W. Bush.

The Obama campaign's new tactic will be to convince voters that they would be worse off with his Republican rival, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, as president because Romney would be similar to Bush, according to an analysis by Andy Sullivan and Caren Bohan for Reuters. Sullivan and Bohan spoke with some Obama campaign insiders for the report.

With the economy in poor shape, many Democrats are coming to the conclusion that they need to contrast Obama's achievements with the state of the economy when he took office in 2009.

Just a month before Obama won election, the nation saw a financial collapse accompanied by a swift decline in home prices. A Monday report by the Federal Reserve quantified the economic devastation of that recession: American's median net worth fell to its lowest levels since 1992.

Obama's new message is reflected by Jonathan Bernstein in a Tuesday article for The Washington Post. The 2012 election is really an election between Obama and George W. Bush, he writes.

Since Obama entered the White House during the deepest part of the recession, Bernstein reasons, the 2012 election will come down to whether voters believe Obama should be held responsible for the economy's current deprivation.

"That's why so many of the campaign messages you're going to hear this year come down to the argument about whether Barack Obama should be rewarded or punished for the current state of the economy, which boils down, in large part, to that Obama vs. Bush question," Bernstein wrote.

In a preview of what's to come, Obama has tied Romney's policies to those of George W. Bush in recent speeches.

"When I hear Governor Romney say his 25 years in the private sector gives him a special understanding of how the economy works, my question is, why are you running with the same bad ideas that brought our economy to the brink of disaster," Obama said.

The setting for Thursday's speech is intended to reinforce Obama's message. Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland is known for its retraining programs which help laid-off workers find new careers in biotechnology, wind power and advanced automotive manufacturing.

Obama will likely use the setting to contrast his proposals for more spending for education and job training with Republican proposals to reduce spending in these areas.

"It's a very successful institution that's a good forum for the president's message. It's likely to appeal to voters whose support he needs," John Green, professor of political science at University of Akron, Akron, Ohio, told Reuters.